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The Onion Rule for Project Managers
June 2, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Musings
The Onion Rule for Project Managers
By Rob Redmond
Almost every assigned task that has any complexity to it requires working through issues. Consider The Onion Rule:
Simple tasks often fall apart like onions. What should require five minutes will inevitably require 10 days to accomplish.
If your boss assigns you to do something as simple as update the status on a ticket, you will inevitably have an experience such as the following:
- Attempt to log into the ticketing system
- The ticketing system has moved. You must find someone to tell you the new location online to use it.
- The person you would normally ask that question is on vacation.
- You find the new location from someone else, but your login does not work.
- You attempt to contact the person who is responsible for logins to the ticketing system, but he no longer works on that application
- You finally find the person who can fix your login, but he requires a ticket from you from another system to which you have no access.
- You finally get access to the first system and create a ticket to fix your login in the second system.
- The ticket is routed to a group which has nothing to do with either system. It is identified as incorrectly entered, so the ticket is closed.
- You contact the group to re-open your ticket, but only the person who closed it can open it. That person is now on vacation.
- Finally someone else with system access updates your ticket for you.
What should require five minutes will probably require 10 days. We have all had such an experience. Many of us find that we peel onions for a living. We peel and peel, and eventually we reach the center, but only after littering a hundred layers of dry wrapping on the ground.
Managers must work to eliminate the effects of the Onion Rule from their operations at every opportunity.
- Train employees to cut through red tape by allowing them to skip prerequisite steps.
- Train employees to offer service by performing prerequisite steps on behalf of people requesting help.
- Create big jobs, not small jobs. Do not have 20 people who do nothing but create tickets which request changes to the ticketing system. Allow the people who solve problems to also work on the tickets and resolve them. Instead of staffing in many layers of multiple organizations which hand work around, hire the same number of smarter people to perform all the work themselves.
- Use Management Analysis. My father’s articles on this site tell the story of how analyzing workflow to reduce the number of steps taken can improve productivity and provide exception return on investment. Do not work the process. Analyze and challenge the process continually.
- Kaizen. Embrace the Japanese concept of a “living” process. Update it daily, removing everything that can be removed. Simplify everything that can be. Eliminate forms. Eliminate approvals. Remove documents. Reduce, consolidate, streamline, and dumb everything down.
We keep experiencing the effects of The Onion Rule everywhere that we go in our companies, but do we ask ourselves if our own desks cause this effect upon others? Do people have this sort of experience when they approach you for help? Wherever possible, reject the onion.
Project Managers have an obligation in their planning to foresee and schedule for the inevitable Onion Rule effects that their participants are likely to encounter. When documenting roles and responsibilities, it is wise to ask questions such as:
- Do you have access to that system? How does one get access? Ensure that every participant can use the tools they need already or knows how to get the ability to use them.
- Is any time-off or vacation planned which will impact a critical need that only one person can fulfill? Hold every participant accountable for training a backup to do their job and setting their Out of Office notification to route traffic to this person.
- Is any group affected by the project that we have not thought of? Inevitably, budgets and scheduling will be jeopardized when an impacted team is identified when you approach the end of the project. Identify them in advance through communication to find out the answers to the questions above.
Rob Redmond studied sociology, psychology, and political science as an undergraduate before entering the workforce. Returning to school, Redmond earned an MBA from Georgia State University in June of 2000. Rob is currently employed as a manager of IT of a large technology company. Rob runs the struggling manager blog where he posts about his experience in both management and project management.
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2 people have left comments
The “Onion Rule” is one of the primary reasons estimation (duration and effort/hours) often produces less than optimal results. When even the most simple seeming task has a variance between 5 minutes and ten days, it’s hopeless. The biggest challenge we face, especially in technology projects, is under estimating complexity.
I definately have experienced that peeling feeling many times. Seems like the most efective way to fight it is to apply learning. Whenever a layer needs to be peeled of, make sure you do it the Toyota way and find the root cause. Then remove that cause.